Lucile Nickerson Colyer — Thy Neighbor

Lucile Colyer turned a voyage to Japan, the sudden death of her husband, and the friendship that carried her through grief into a book-length protest against wartime racial hatred. Written in plain, direct verse, Thy Neighbor follows Japanese and Japanese American friends from shipboard companionship through war, forced removal, incarceration, military service, and resettlement. Colyer writes as a Los Angeles woman struggling to hold onto the people she actually knows while newspapers, government orders, and wartime fear reduce them to an enemy image. The poem is earnest and deliberately repetitive: grief becomes a daily practice of attention, recurring phrases gather moral pressure, and the word “neighbor” is tested against what the country was willing to do. Its six-part structure makes an intimate bereavement widen into a record of national betrayal, sustained by one writer’s stubborn refusal to let friendship yield to propaganda.